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Did you find the title appropriate? Would you say that the subject matter in Jellyfish is bleak?2. The film is set in Tel Aviv. However, some critics say that Jellyfish is not an “Israeli film.” Do you agree with this statement? Did you find anything particularly Israeli in the film?3. How is Joy different from Keren and Batya? Which character did you find compelling?4. Water is a recurring visual theme in the film. What is its symbolic meaning?5. Magical realism in cinema uses a strong dose of reality mixed in with the magic. Discuss one or two scenes that best reflect this storytelling technique.6. Jellyfish is about loneliness, missing persons, and the luck of connection between people. Discuss specific examples from the film.7. What do you think of the filmmakers’ use of flashbacks, especially to Bathya’s childhood?8. Jellyfish has very little conventional linear plot development. What effect does it have on the viewers?9. The film opens and ends with a Hebrew rendition of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose.” What’s your understanding of this decision? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzeLynj1GYM
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Jellyfish
(Meduzot)
By Etgar Keret and Shira
Geffen
Israel, 2007, 1h18min
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israels-population-hits-92m-including193m-arabs/1820022
• Israel’s current population: 9.2 million
• 6.8 million Jews (74%), 1.93 million Arabs (21%), and
454,000 non-Arab Christians or adherents of other faiths
(5%), according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics
(CBS).
• 3.3 million Jewish people have immigrated to Israel since the
founding of the state, 44% of whom came after 1990, many or
most of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
• At present, 45% of the global Jewish population lives in
Israel.
Orly Iubin, Body and Territory: Women in Israeli Cinema
• Early Israeli women’s cinema emerged at the end of the 1960s with Alida
Gera’s first feature film, Before Tomorrow, and gathered momentum in
the 1970s and 1980s with Michal Bat Adam’s Moments, Thin Line,
and Boy Meets Girl; Mira Recanati’s A Thousand Little Kisses; Idit
Shehori’s Weekend Circles; and Tzipi Trope’s Tell Me That You Love Me.
• Inspired by feminist European cinema of the same period (such as the
films of Dianne Kurys and Agnes Varda), early women’s films
challenged the exclusion and constructed otherness of women on the
Israeli screen.
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather
becomes, a woman.” Biology does not determine what makes a woman a
woman—a woman learns her role from man and others in society.
Orly Iubin, Body and Territory: Women in Israeli Cinema
• Early women’s films were produced alongside modernist Israeli cinema,
known as the New Sensibility or Personal Cinema (Ne’eman).
• The New Sensibility films were influenced by the avant-garde aesthetic of
1960s French New Wave cinema (La Nouvelle Vague)
https://www.masterclass.com/articles/french-new-wave-guide#the-3-primary-characteristics-of-frenchnew-wave-cinema
• The New Sensibility films focused on existential questions related to the world
of the individual and on universal themes of love, sexuality, and friendship that
are cut off from the wider social and regional context—were directed by men
who explicitly
– ignored the woman and her look, or alternatively
– depicted her as a spectacle for the voyeuristic male gaze
Yossef Raz, Conditions of Visibility: Trauma and contemporary
israeli women’s cinema (2017)
• The past decade has marked a renaissance of women’s cinema in
Israel.
• A new generation of female filmmakers is seeking to redefine the
conditions of women’s representability in Israeli society and cinema.
• In their films, they deal with current problems in the lives of
• women in Israel, or with
• issues that have been excluded from the public agenda.
Yossef Raz, Conditions of Visibility: Trauma and
contemporary israeli women’s cinema (2017)
• Most of the women’s films deal with the catastrophic event of rape as
well as with losses entailed by experiences of immigration and
displacement, traumas of racism and ethnic discrimination, and injured
subjectivities of the memory of the Holocaust and of war and military
occupation.
• Feminist film theorist Claire Johnston [construction of ideology in
mainstream cinema] defines women’s cinema as a “counter-cinema”
(1973) that disrupts the traditional formal and narrative practices
responsible for the objectification, stereotyping, and mythologization
of women in film.
Yossef Raz, Conditions of Visibility: Trauma and
contemporary Israeli women’s cinema (2017)
• Teresa de Lauretis [film theory], proposes a different approach to
women’s cinema that is reconstructive rather than deconstructive: “The
present task of women’s cinema may not be destruction of narrative
and visual pleasure, but rather construction of another frame of
reference, one in which the measure of desire is no longer just the
male subject.” (1985)
• What is at stake is not so much how to ‘make visible the invisible’ but
how to produce the conditions of representability of another social
subject.
• According to de Lauretis, women’s cinema produces new images of
women while addressing the female rather than the male viewer.
Etgar Keret
Born in Israel, 1967. He teaches film at Ben Gurion
University.
A contributor to the New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/etgar-keret
Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer known for his short stories,
graphic novels, and scriptwriting for film and television. His
books had been published in more than 45 languages.
His short film Malka Lev Adom (Skin Deep, 1996) won an
Israel Film Academy award and first place in the Munich
International Festival of Film Schools.
The film Jellyfish received the Camera d’Or prize at the 2007
Cannes Film Festival.
Shira Geffen
Born in Israel, 1971. Daughter of
poet and author Yonatan Geffen.
Actress, screenwriter, film director
and children’s book writer.
She has acted in a television series
and has written and directed
Jellyfish with her husband Etgar
Keret.
The French Artists’ and Writers’
Guild also gave Geffen and Keret
its Best Director Award (2007).
Interview with the filmmakers:
Plot: https://www.kanopy.com/en/laguardia/video/5263750
• Winner of three prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. Official Selection at
the Toronto International Film Festival.
• JELLYFISH tells the story of three very different Tel Aviv women whose
intersecting stories weave an unlikely portrait of modern Israeli life.
• Batya, a catering waitress, takes in a child apparently abandoned at a
local beach. Batya is one of the servers at the wedding reception of
Keren, a bride who breaks her leg escaping a locked toilet stall, ruining
her chance at a dream Caribbean honeymoon. And attending the event
with an employer is Joy, a non-Hebrew-speaking domestic worker who
has guiltily left her son behind in her native Philippines.
A film with neither politics nor religion
• Each character has to face a challenge.
• 3 episodes painting states of mind rather then telling stories.
• 3 women at crossroads in need of making decisions but feeling
somewhat ambivalent about their choices. Why?
• The characters are at the mercy of the currents and tides and seem
incapable of controlling their own fates.
• Any link with the title?
Themes
Drab fabric of
modern existence
Lack of control over
our lives (wander)
Loneliness of city
dwellers, isolation
Disappointment
Sense of the absurd
Elusive nature of
happiness
Dysfunctional
families and
wretched personal
lives
Sense of waiting for
something
Magic Realism – The Magical Realism Genre/Style
Looking through an entirely different lens
• Term used in literature, art, theater (1925): acceptance of
magic and irrational as natural in the real world. >Reality mixed with magic
• Genre that features everyday life events that are made
livelier with some magic.
• Why? This technique can help us to derive deeper
understanding of otherwise mundane events.
• Deliver a more clearly refined world that reflects a mix
of both the familiar and the irrational/supernatural.
• Short introduction:https://www.vox.com/2014/4/20/5628812/11questions-youre-too-embarrassed-to-ask-about-magical-realism
• Short videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od3A6Mc8Lao
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vn4X6J7TT8
• 1. Did you find the title appropriate? Would you say that the subject matter in Jellyfish is
bleak?
Film
Discussion
Questions
• 2. The film is set in Tel Aviv. However, some critics say that Jellyfish is not an “Israeli
film.” Do you agree with this statement? Did you find anything particularly Israeli in the
film?
• 3. How is Joy different from Keren and Batya? Which character did you find
compelling?
• 4. Water is a recurring visual theme in the film. What is its symbolic meaning?
• 5. Magical realism in cinema uses a strong dose of reality mixed in with the magic.
Discuss one or two scenes that best reflect this storytelling technique.
• 6. Jellyfish is about loneliness, missing persons, and the luck of connection between
people. Discuss specific examples from the film.
• 7. What do you think of the filmmakers’ use of flashbacks, especially to Bathya’s
childhood?
• 8. Jellyfish has very little conventional linear plot development. What effect does it have
on the viewers?
• 9. The film opens and ends with a Hebrew rendition of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose.”
What’s your understanding of this decision?
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